Channing Tatum is reflecting on a wild time in his life when he briefly worked as a male stripper.
The Magic Mike actor, 45, stopped by The Drew Barrymore Show on Friday (Jan. 23) where he got candid about working in a strip club and discussed how stripping now is completely different than it used to be.
“I’m not gonna lie, it’s weird,” Tatum said of his former job. “Back then, it was a different kind than we’re doing now.”
He continued, “I mean, I was 18 and just kind of looking to go a little crazy, you know. I was looking for the wild time and I found it.”
Tatum went on to explain that it involved a lot of interaction with people he didn’t know—and it could go from entertaining to weird pretty quickly.
“You go out and get on somebody you don’t know and it’s fun until somebody’s like, ‘You remind me of my nephew.’ And you’re like, ‘What?? Okay…can I have the dollar now?’ Moving on. It’s weird,” Tatum recalled.
While it was just a short detour on Tatum’s road to fame, his job as a stripper ended up being a pretty important part of his journey as it helped inspire the Magic Mike franchise.
“I did do it for about eight months of my life, which is a relatively short period of time. It’s not like I made a career out of it or anything,” he told The Aquarian back in 2012 before the first film debuted.
He continued, “This movie is really a bit of an explanation of my brief experience in that world. I represented a new generation of strippers where it was no longer about the long hair and all that, but about hip-hop and kinda doing your own thing.”
You can hear all that Channing had to say on The Drew Barrymore Show below.
This story was originally published by Parade on Jan 24, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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